MIMO for a wireless world

The leading edge of the cellular community has very much jumped on the bandwagon of the most important innovation in several decades.

As the 3GSM World Conference meets in Barcelona this week, MIMO is a technology that only few people are talking about. Politics and jockeying for an immediate advantage tends to dominate big conferences.

But MIMO is likely to change the playing field dramatically over the next decade.

MIMO uses multiple radios and antennas to increase dramatically the performance of virtually any wireless system. Highly optimized versions could increase cell base station capacity by as much as eight fold, enable much faster data transfer to the cell phone itself, or, do both as needed.

The cell phone industry is well aware of MIMO. Standards for any of the next-generation cellular technologies generally known as super 3G, include a MIMO component. The performance boost will be remarkable and until MIMO no one really knew how different the next generation could really be.